James is a weird one. I am a pretty big fan of his books “the art of not being governed” and “seeing like a state” as academic examinations of the conflict between everyday life and statism. I also think his “against the grain” is a fascinating look at how agriculture actually came about. This book though is not it, he writes with the casual defeatism of someone who is among the highest rungs of society. Mustering the same casual defense of the status quo academics and philosophers have been deploying for generations, most humourously skewered in this comic imho https://existentialcomics.com/comic/350

I think if people who might be the audience for this would be better served reading something like Graeber’s Debt or The dawn of everything. While they focus on different things they both appeal to the same intellectual liberal audience (as well as other ofc) and the analysis of history is more interesting; Nudging people towards more radical conclusions.

Honestly it’s quite sad to see someone who studied peasant resistance and wrote a very even handed criticism of centralisation reduce anarchism to crossing the street on a red light and sometimes listening to crowds.

It should be noted that the reason Scott is so palatable for the hegemony is that he wasn’t an anarchist, so “anarchish” is probably an apt description. Freedom News, for example, proclaimed that Scott “may not have identified publicly as an Anarchist but he certainly was an anarchist” and then evidenced this by stating that “in Two Cheers for Anarchism he employs what he calls an “anarchist squint”” which, to me, is evidence that he wasn’t an anarchist and didn’t use the anarchist theoretical framework as anarchists do. For Scott, it was to applied in addition to another framework because it could illuminate failings of the system, but it shouldn’t be your natural lens. It’s called Two Cheers and not Three Cheers for a reason. Then, of course, they talk about his reporting for the CIA.

Freedom’s Article: https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/07/25/james-c-scott-1936-2024/